This is the second part of the Cotton harvest campaign monitoring prepared by Alternative
Turkmenistan News (ATN), a civil media initiative founded in 2010.

The key message of this monitoring is that by sending tens of thousands of state-employed people to harvest cotton every autumn the Turkmen authorities for years have been violating the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention №105, which prohibits forced labor and Convention №29 on forced labor. Besides, the practice of forcing people to pick cotton goes against Turkmenistan’s own Labor Code, chapter 8 of which defines forced labor as “all work or service exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”

This monitoring is aimed to demonstrate the working and leisure conditions of people in the fields, which in most of the cases are far from minimal: involuntary workers (men and women, healthy and sick, old and young) lack drinking water, food, hygiene and medical care. Considering this as well as simply the fact that picking cotton is a hard physical work, the vast majority of state-employed people for whom cotton harvesting is a must at risk of losing a job, prefer to hire people to go to the field instead of them. Since this year private entrepreneurs are also forced to pick cotton or otherwise hire somebody. Market merchants, owners of shops and cafes pay out of their own pockets and complain why they must do it if they have no business with cotton at all.